Wide area surveillance and reconnaissance in many DoD (Department of Defense) and homeland security applications generally entails an airborne platform providing a desired view of the area of interest. Known image processing methods require multiple CPUs to calculate the transformation for image registration, requires special hardware, e.g. GPU, requires manual identification of major features or landmarks, require active sensors, do not consider atmospheric conditions, e.g. transmittance, reflectance, scene dynamics. The surveillance needs of large critical infrastructures and key resources that may span for miles may demand a field of view that exceeds that provided by a single airborne sensor. Image registration of aerial imagery can increase the field of view while providing a panoramic view. This increases the field of view without any modification to the optics, focal plane array, and associated hardware. This invention presents a multi-stage image registration technique utilizing hybrid similarity measures for partially overlapped aerial imagery, in the presence of sensor uncertainty and noise. The presented algorithm also provides a reduction in the search space, reducing the computational cost.